[Pan-devel] Re: CVS version and download speed

[Duncan]

Tom Dexter posted
<address@hidden>, excerpted
below,  on Tue, 04 Oct 2005 14:47:25 -0500:

> I'll try some changes to CFLAGS.  Actually the 0.14.2 version that works
> well for me was compiled outside of Gentoo as well (without my make.conf
> flags) as I use a version where I have hacked a few things to my liking
> (keyboard command changes and small stuff).

For keyboard command changes, no custom recompile necessary.  Simply hover
the mouse pointer over the menu item you wish to delete or change the
hotkey for, and enter the new hotkey (or press delete to delete the old
one, to be used elsewhere).  

With combo keys (ctrl/alt/shift in some combination pressed, in addition
to the "main" key), this should work fine.  With single-letter hotkeys
that happen to be menu accelerator keys in that particular menu, it won't
work, of course, because the menu accelerator will be activated instead. 
(An example would be under the Go menu, if you try to set "Next _U_nread
Article to "N", it won't take, activating the "Next _N_ew Article" entry
instead, because "N" is the menu accelerator key for that entry in that
menu.)  For these, editing the accelerator config file is required.

PAN's keyboard accelerator config file is found in PAN's data dir
(normally ~/.pan/data) as accels.txt.  As mentioned above, you may have to
edit it directly to map certain keys.  In this file, a line with a ; in
front of it indicates a default entry.  Remove the semicolon and edit the
line to reflect your desired mapping.

Note that PAN re-saves this file each time it is closed, to reflect
current mapping (thus allowing remapping from the GUI to be stored for the
next session), and scrambles the action order in the process, so if you
reorder things, I suggest making a copy of the file, then copying it back
to the accels.txt file for PAN to use, any time you make changes. 
However, the scrambled order is fine, if you use the "find" functionality
in your editor of choice to find the function you want.  Something else
you may wish to do, is keep a list of what accels you've used, and which
ones are available to be used.

Here, I keep a human-readable copy of the file, ordered in application
menu order, so it's easy to find the action I want to change.  At the end
of this file, I keep a table of the possible accels and the ones I've
used, including still-mapped defaults, so I know what's available for use.
(Note that the table below doesn't use alt, which I've reserved for use
with global hotkey mapping, so I can't use it for application hotkey
mapping.  BTW, backtick didn't work, last I tried.)

; ********* Used Accel table *********
; Char  Pln     Ctl     Shf     CtlShf
; a     a       c-a     s-a     cs-a
; b                             cs-b
; c     c                       cs-c
; d     d       c-d     s-d     cs-d
...
; 9
; 0
; -
; =
; home  home    c-home          cs-home
; end   end     c-end           cs-end
; pgup  pgup            s-pgup
...
; Retn  Retn
; esc
; f1    f1      c-f1
; f2            c-f2
; f3    f3      c-f3
...
; f12
; [
; ]
...
; .
; /

Obviously, if I've gone to all this work to use it, the accelerator
remapping feature in PAN is something I use rather heavily.  I had a
TERRIBLE time back during the early 0.12.x period, right after PAN had
converted to GTK+2, and was still trying to work under the IMO misguided
early GTK+2 apparent philosophy that all users are DUMB users, and DUMB
users don't WANT configurability, preferring instead to have their choices
dictated by some HIG, which /MUST/ after all know best.  That Charles
decided to scrap that, and give users the ability to configure hotkeys
once again, and what that says for his programming philosophy, probably
has a lot to do with why PAN is one of the few GTK apps I still use.  (My
desktop is mostly KDE, due in part to the fact that I can almost always
reconfigure it to my liking, something Gnome's philosophy tends to make
difficult or impossible.  Naturally, KDE's keyboard shortcuts are also
generally reconfigurable, or I'd not be using it, either.)

____

As for speed, I'm on a cable modem too, but currently capped at 4mbps. 
Cox, my ISP, has three servers, each allowing four connections, each
connection capped at 384kbps.  Thus each server allows 4*384kbps=1.5Mbps. 
Three servers @ 1.5Mbps each is 4.5Mbps total download bandwidth, over 12
connections.  That matches quite well my 4Mbps capped connection.  Cox had
9Mbps available in the area for $10-15 more/mo, but I'm still connecting
thru an old Netgear RT314 gateway router that only has a 10bT Ethernet
WAN connector, so I doubt I'd get 9Mbps if I did upgrade, at this point.
Someday, I'll upgrade that, and then look at the 9Mbps or whatever
package.  Meanwhile, klibido, with it's automatic handling of multiple
servers, works better than PAN does for binaries, here.  I still use PAN
for text, however, altho I've been thinking I need to fire up knode again
to see how it does in modern versions, maybe allowing me to get rid of
GTK+2 if I find I no longer need PAN, as well.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman in
http://www.linuxdevcenter.com/pub/a/linux/2004/12/22/rms_interview.html